There's a lot of things you can use to create rest services, and then they can be consumed by almost anything. Of particular awesomeness is the ability to hit them in your web browser, just because we're all so familiar with them.

When I need a 'quick and dirty' rest solution, I use Restlet - I won't claim it's the only solution, but it's the easiest I've ever worked with. I've literally said in a meeting "I could have XYZ up in 10 minutes." Someone else in the meeting called me on it, and sure enough, using Restlet I was able to get a functioning REST server running with the (very simple) features I said I would get in the meeting. It was pretty slick.

Here's a barebones server that has one method, returning the current time. Running the server and hitting 127.0.0.1:12345/sample/time will return the current time.

import org.restlet.Application;
import org.restlet.Component;
import org.restlet.Context;
import org.restlet.Restlet;
import org.restlet.data.Protocol;
import org.restlet.routing.Router;
/**
* This Application creates an HTTP server with a singple service
* that tells you the current time.
* @author corsiKa
*/
public class ServerMain extends Application {
/**
* The main method. If you don't know what a main method does, you
* probably are not advanced enough for the rest of this tutorial.
* @param args Command line args, completely ignored.
* @throws Exception when something goes wrong. Yes I'm being lazy here.
*/
public static void main(String...args) throws Exception {
// create the interface to the outside world
final Component component = new Component();
// tell the interface to listen to http:12345
component.getServers().add(Protocol.HTTP, 12345);
// create the application, giving it the component's context
// technically, its child context, which is a protected version of its context
ServerMain server = new ServerMain(component.getContext().createChildContext());
// attach the application to the interface
component.getDefaultHost().attach(server);
// go to town
component.start();
}
// just your everyday chaining constructor
public ServerMain(Context context) {
super(context);
}
/** add hooks to your services - this will get called by the component when
* it attaches the application to the component (I think... or somewhere in there
* it magically gets called... or something...)
*/
public Restlet createRoot() {
// create a router to route the incoming queries
Router router = new Router(getContext().createChildContext());
// attach your resource here
router.attach("/sample/time", CurrentTimeResource.class);
// return the router.
return router;
}
}

And here's the 'current time resource' that it uses:

import org.restlet.representation.Representation;
import org.restlet.representation.StringRepresentation;
import org.restlet.resource.Get;
import org.restlet.resource.ServerResource;
/**
* A resource that responds to a get request and returns a StringRepresentaiton
* of the current time in milliseconds from Epoch
* @author corsiKa
*/
public class CurrentTimeResource extends ServerResource {
@Get // add the get annotation so it knows this is for gets
// method is pretty self explanatory
public Representation getTime() {
long now = System.currentTimeMillis();
String nowstr = String.valueOf(now);
Representation result = new StringRepresentation(nowstr);
return result;
}
}